Angelic Witness Protection
by theflashisgone
Summary: My take on how Gabriel acquires the vessel we see in the show and gets adopted into the Norse Pantheon.


Gabriel was fed up. He'd moved out of Heaven after Lucifer fell, but had still done his job when his dad called him to. Lately, though, everything had really gone to shit. In the centuries since Lucifer was trapped in the cage, Michael had gradually become more and more controlling of the younger angels. He dealt with Lucifer's betrayal by convincing himself that he didn't love his younger brother, and didn't feel as though a big chunk of his grace was in the cage with Lucifer.

After the Jesus debacle, God pretty much goes out to buy milk and doesn't come back. Michael and Raphael were the only angels in regular contact with him, so they manage to keep it quiet, but Gabriel takes his father's absence as his cue to cut himself off from Heaven. The only problem with this plan is that the angels can easily recognize him, should they come looking. Even if he acquires some other source of power so he can conceal his grace, even the humans know his current vessel, a Bronze Age woman called Jossa.

As he's contemplating angelic witness protection, Gabriel hears a prayer.

As an archangel, Gabriel can easily tune out the vast majority of the prayers directed at him. Even he would be overwhelmed if he had to listen to all of them. However, there are certain situations in which an angel will always hear prayers. One of these is if an angel's true vessel is making a last desperate plea for help. Given that it's now AD 341 and he's due for another true vessel to be born, Gabriel guesses that's probably what's happening. He flies to what will eventually become Northern Denmark to see what his vessel needs.

Materializing in a small, windowless house, Gabriel sees a man lying on a pallet and staring at the fire in the middle of the room. The man was about average in size for a Norseman at 5'7", with reddish-brown hair and beard and brown eyes. In his late thirties, he was probably one of the older men in his community still capable of physical labor, or he would be if he was healthy. Even if he couldn't feel the man's life force, Gabriel would be able to smell the festering gash across the man's hip. Without help, he'd be dead of septic shock inside a week. Gabriel made himself visible and reduced the man's fever enough for him to be lucid.

"Did I just die?" the man asked, sounding dazed.

"No," Gabriel replied, "I healed you so we could talk. You prayed for help."

"Are you a goddess?"

Gabriel hesitated. While he'd always been a bit irreverent, he didn't particularly want to commit sacrilege. Deciding that if Dad had a serious problem with pagan gods, he'd have bothered to do something about them, he answered the man. "That remains to be seen. Why don't you tell me what's going on? Let's start with your name. I'm Gabriel, by the way."

The man looked a bit confused about Gabriel's godliness remaining to be seen, but started explaining anyway. "I am Loki Jǫtunnsonr—"

"Son of a giant?" Gabriel interrupted.

The man, Loki, rolled his eyes. "Of course not. Not literally, anyway. My father was simply nicknamed that because he was very tall. At any rate, my village, as I am sure you already know, is very small."

Having teleported directly into the house, Gabriel had no idea what the village was like, but he nodded and Loki continued.

"We do not properly belong to any particular tribe, which has never really been a problem before. We fish our stretch of coast and raise barley and goats and we are self-sufficient. In the last two years, though, the Danes to the South have been kidnapping men from my village. I know they trade with Rome, and I believe they are selling captives as slaves in exchange for Roman goods."

"Is that how you were wounded, they tried to take you as a slave?" Gabriel asked.

"Not me. My youngest just had a baby, so I was helping her husband milk the sheep, and a raiding party took him. I tried to fight them off, but Torbjorn was taken and I will die and Eydís will have no one to help her care for her son, since her sisters are already struggling with being newly-widowed."

Gabriel had pretty much made up his mind to help Loki's village, even if Loki didn't agree to be his vessel, but he would try to get Loki to say yes first.

"Look, Loki, I have god-like power, but I need to inhabit a human from a specific lineage. I heard your prayer because your lineage is the one that my vessels come from. The woman I'm wearing now, she's held me since before your people settled here and I'm ready to let her move on. I can help your village, but I need a new vessel. If I can stop the raids on your village, will you allow me to inhabit you?"

Loki looked as though he was trying not to get his hopes up. "Can you bring back Torbjorn and the others who have been taken?"

Gabriel grinned. "I'd be a pretty sorry excuse for a god-like being if I couldn't."

Loki smiled peacefully. "Then yes."

Having gotten consent, Gabriel moved into Loki's body and sent Jossa's soul on to her afterlife. Her body, he reshaped to look like Loki's so if any angels came looking, it would appear that Loki had died of his infection. Just housing an archangel was enough to heal Loki's body of all injuries, scars, and even things like wrinkles and damaged teeth. Gabriel replaced Loki's bloodstained clothes with higher quality wool pants and tunic with sturdy leather boots and rabbit-lined cloak. He then completed the outfit with leather armor, a helmet adorned with some of his own primary wing coverts, and a six-foot-long fourteenth-century bardiche. Gabriel was not going for subtle; he wanted the Danes to fear godly retribution for attacking Loki's village.

Gabriel's first order of business was to find the men responsible for selling Loki's friends and family into slavery. He wasn't picky, he just located the Danes whose souls were most tarnished with human trafficking. He watched as each one was lured away by a siren; a beautiful woman or a lost but wealthy-looking foreigner or a friend offering free drink. Once each man had abandoned his family for whatever vice Gabriel offered, Gabriel put them in chains and stuck them in limbo until he had someplace to leave them.

The families of the stolen Danes told stories of the warrior who had lured their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers away before vanishing with them. The rescued men of Loki's village told rather different stories. No matter where he'd ended up, each one told his family about the man (who looked remarkably like Loki would've if he'd been a warrior instead of a farmer) who appeared with a fluttering sound and a Dane in shackles and took him home, sans the Dane. Eydís and her two older sisters mourned their father's death but were glad to have their husbands back. The Romans who'd ended up owning the villagers were very confused when their slaves were replaced, but the replacements were equally sound and non-Roman, so it was a pretty even swap once they were trained to do whatever jobs the previous slaves had had.

After finding that he quite enjoyed punishing the assholes who'd been raiding Loki's village, Gabriel had spent the last few years hanging around Northern Europe and giving assholes their just deserts. He'd always had to behave himself so he didn't give angels a bad name, so being able to have horse thieves trampled to death and child molesters raped was especially liberating. Gabriel was indulging his sweet tooth with some baked apples when a large Norse-looking man walked in. Given that he'd built his home on a mountain where one could only reach it by flight or teleportation, Gabriel figured it was a safe bet that the man wasn't human.

"Can I help you?" Gabriel asked. Let it never be said that he was incapable of hospitality.

"You're the fellow who's been punishing the wicked with tricks," the man said brusquely.

"I am," Gabriel answered him.

"I'm trying to establish a pantheon for these parts, and we can't have someone running around being godly without being one of us, but we've got space for a trickster."

Gabriel smirked. "Are you offering me a job?"

"Yes. Interested?"

"Depends. Who are you?"

The man bowed. "I am Odin, leader of my little group."

Gabriel stuck a hand toward him before remembering that handshakes weren't really a thing yet. "Loki," he said, using his vessel's name for lack of a better one, "I'd be delighted to be your trickster."


End file.
